Aural Fixations

BUDDY GUY
Sweet Tea
(Silvertone) Over fifty years ago, the lowdown dirty country blues went to the big city, got cleaned up (more or less) and hit the big time (more or less). That's an extremely simplistic way of putting it, of course, and not entirely accurate. Recordings of country blues, performed with little more than an acoustic guitar, harmonica and the force of the singer's personality, had been hitting the so-called race record charts for decades by the time the music migrated from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and Detroit, and it's hard to think of the electric blues created by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as "clean." That said, there are plenty of blues scholars (or fanatics, depending on your perspective) who think the blues lost something after consorting with the demon electricity. Records by Waters, Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, etc. don't bear this impression out, but perhaps the music that came after them sometimes does. Once a bluesman was able to plug in his guitar or harmonica and make it scream and cry, he was encouraged to keep it screaming and crying. That drew the attention of the white boys, who used their more practiced skill to extend the tradition into five, ten, even twenty-minute solos. Then the white boys started writing songs to showcase their skill and many of the black bluesman followed suit. Everybody kept cranking up those amps and flailing away at those six-strings, and somewhere along the way the emotional expression that is supposed to be the heart of the blues got lost in the flash and feedback.

Fortunately for the blues, two things kept the home fires burning. Number one, there were plenty of blues guitarists (B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Michael Hill, Johnny Winter) who remembered the raison d'être of the form, and used their fire 'n' finesse to bare their souls as tellingly as they would with words and voices. Number two, blues scholars went back to Mississippi and discovered a new, or, more accurately, continuously evolving strain of Delta blues that used electric instruments but sounded more like the country blues of the early 20th century. Artists like R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, Cedell Davis and the late Junior Kimbrough set the blues aflame once more, with the kind of repetitive song structures, raw technical skills and sheer emotional power that makes the best country blues resonate in the souls of all who hear it. A label, Fat Possum, was created to document this music and a blues that was close to its origins while still contemporary was introduced to the world.

So it was only a matter of time before an example of number one dived into a pool of number two, and it's fitting that Buddy Guy be the one to get his hands dirty. Born in Louisiana, schooled in Chicago by Muddy Waters, the irrepressible Guy embodies the best and worst of contemporary electric blues. Whether on stage or in the studio, he's equally capable of the most soulful, searing music you could ever hope to hear or the most dull, banal crap you could ever hope to avoid. Over the past decade especially, on a series of albums that cater to the Caucasian classic rock crowd via high-profile guest stars like Eric Clapton, Johnny Lang and Travis Tritt (?), he's moved from hero to hack and back again*. He's at his best when challenged, pushed either by his producers, his fellow musicians or by the stakes of the performance, and it's become increasing rare when magic happens. Until now, that is.

Recorded in Oxford, MS, in the studio for which the record is named, Sweet Tea finds Buddy Guy shining brighter than he has in years by covering the artists who've kept the Delta blues tradition alive. Featuring songs by Junior Kimbrough, Cedell Davis, Robert Cage and T-Model Ford, the album puts Guy in the position of interpreter, as he takes a set of songs he's never heard before these sessions, indeed, has admitted in interviews he's not even sure he likes, and performs them in as raw a manner as possible, with only two guitars, bass, drums and his own inimitable soul. Though the backup musicians are all known quantities (rhythm guitarist Jimbo Mathus fronts the Squirrel Nut Zippers, bassist Davey Faragher plays with John Hiatt, drummers Spam and Sam Carr punch cards with T-Model Ford and the Jelly Roll Kings, respectively), this is no super session; it's Guy's show all the way. He may claim not to care for these songs, but you'd never detect that in these tracks. Challenged with the task of convincingly performing songs with which he's unfamiliar, he rises up like a returning champion out to prove he's still got it. Something about these tunes must strike a familiar chord in Guy, as he finds the heart of a tune and uses his axe magic to rip it bodily from the breast and lay it out, bloody but still pumping, on his sleeve. He stays true to the spirit of each song, but translates it to his style. This isn't Buddy Guy imitating a blues form he knows little about, but Guy reinterpreting it in his own powerful way, with a turbocharged guitar sound that comes from volume and his distinctive brand of six-string strangling. With a thunderous bassline and Stratocaster riffs that shake to pieces the mountain Hendrix tried to chop down with the edge of his hand, Kimbrough's "Baby Please Don't Leave Me" becomes the heavy blues fusion that Led Zeppelin was going for on their first album, only with genuine soul. In his hardworking hands, Ford's "Look What All You Got," Davis's "She Got the Devil in Her" and Kimbrough's "I Gotta Try You Girl" express their emotional messages through scorching solos as much as through vocal pain and repetitive rhythm. Quite simply, he plays the hell out of these songs, savaging the muse in a way he hasn't done since his landmark 80s album Stone Crazy.

There are a couple of ringers in the song selection, naturally. Lowell Fulsom's "Tramp" gets a typically sardonic Guy reading, with molten guitar augmented by a vocal that laughs to keep from crying, and the record closes with "It's a Jungle Out There," a heartfelt original. But the real story here is the successful reintroduction of the city to its country roots, an emotionally taught lovemaking session that finds each partner giving as good as it gets. It's also a timely reinvention of a beloved blues icon; with Sweet Tea, Buddy Guy proves that he's still capable of righteously wailing and soulfully stoking the fire of the blues. Michael Toland

For fans of: Jimi Hendrix's blues tunes, Muddy Waters, Stevie Ray Vaughan